A Woman’s Unraveling: On Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist

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New York City, 1924: the Volstead Act has spawned a thriving bootlegging industry, jazz throbs from secret speakeasies, the hemlines are scandalous, and girls are bobbing their hair. The world has changed so rapidly that even some of the young are disoriented. Rose, Suzanne Rindell’s narrator, is a straitlaced young woman who was raised by nuns. She views the excesses of the jazz age from afar and with some suspicion. Rose understands that some people have the luxury of risking the wild freedoms of this new era, and others don’t. She has an orphan’s understanding of the precariousness of her place in the world. She follows the rules.

In early adulthood, she’s built a respectable life for herself: she’s employed as a typist at a police station in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she sits in on confessions and types up reports, and goes home in the evenings to a boarding house. She is extraordinarily competent in her work — 160 WPM on a manual typewriter? Okay, fine, it’s fiction — and cautious in her day-to-day life.

The other typist is Odalie. When she appears for a job interview at the station, she exerts a magnetic pull on the others; Rose is mesmerized, as is the sergeant, the lieutenant detective, and everyone else. “There was an excitement in the air around her,” Rindell writes, “an excitement that might include you in some way, as though you were her secret collaborator.”

Rose is wary of “modern girls” like Odalie, with their bob haircuts and their casual entitlement, their way of moving through the city as if the city existed for their amusement. The Other Typist is a chronicle of a woman’s unraveling, but it’s also a subtle examination of economic privilege. The rapidly loosening mores of that time looked like freedom, but the level of risk that comes with freedom is never, of course, the same for everyone. Everyone who frequented the speakeasies of 1920s New York was taking a risk, but some had a net to catch them if they fell, and others didn’t. Rose’s impression that the new era isn’t for people like her doesn’t seem unwarranted.

But for all of Rose’s love of the rules, she has a certain weakness. She introduces herself as an orphan, but technically she isn’t, or at least she wasn’t when she was dropped off at the orphanage as an infant. Rose wasn’t orphaned, she was abandoned by her family, and Rindell expertly suggests the subtle vulnerability that lingers in her as a result. Odalie is a con artist, but in order for a con to work, the dupe has to want to believe. When Odalie turns the full force of her charms on Rose and eventually invites Rose to move in with her, Rose is flattered and grateful enough to ignore her doubts. By the time Rose discovers Odalie’s true business and what she’s doing working at the police station, it’s too late. She is enmeshed, for precisely the same reason that no one thought to ask why a woman of such obvious means as Odalie required employment as a typist in the first place: “I can only say we are all susceptible to blind spots when exposed to the right dazzling flash.”

Given the era, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons between Odalie and Jay Gatsby. Odalie is magnetic, charming, mysteriously wealthy, and engaged in shady business practices. There’s even a climactic party on Long Island. But if anything, Odalie is Gatsby’s mirror image; the trick of Fitzgerald’s character was that while Gatsby was obviously a fraud — James Gatz of North Dakota — he was in some essential sense abetter and truer man than the careless and frivolous and perfectly respectable people who used their own names and their own unembellished backstories as they flitted through his life. Odalie is much darker. It isn’t that her charm and beauty and mysterious wealth conceals any malice; in order to feel malice, a person has to care.

There’s a certain amount of unnecessary exposition in the first half of the book, and the novel is hampered at times by a weakness for excessive foreshadowing; in the early chapters especially, there are a great many of those “but little did I know what would come next” asides that do little to move a story forward and that can even suggest a certain — in this case entirely unwarranted — insecurity on the part of the writer. But Rindell is a fine writer, and she’s written a suspenseful and well-executed novel. The Other Typist is an elegant debut.

The teenage and twenty-somethings who people Justin Taylor’sEverything Here is the Best Thing Ever face many impediments to happiness, and principal among these is debilitating self-obsession. Taylor depicts a generation raised on video games and cable-news politics, a nation where alcohol abuse and sexual discord are the main rites of passage. There’s a sense of entitlement that clouds the vision of his characters and blurs the boundaries between sex and love, faith and religion, politics and art. And while there is some hope that pervades many of these stories, the sense that this hope can ever be rewarded is conspicuously absent. To these people youth is merely an aggregation of disappointment and failure. Even among the characters who more or less get what they want, it’s suggested that there are no real winners here. As the narrator in the story “Tetris” makes clear: “This game is designed to end, not to be beaten.”
Although this is his first published collection of short fiction, Justin Taylor has also published a book of poems, compiled an anthology of apocalypse-themed literature, and guest edited an issue of McSweeney’s in which he compiled the symposium "Come Back, Donald Barthelme." Taylor is a thinker well engaged in post-modern literature, tied particularly close, one would think, to Barthelme. However, while Taylor’s work clearly owes a lot to Barthelme, Everything Here is at its best when veering off on a more distinctively original course, relying less on Barthelmean pastiche and more on traditional tropes. The stories longer in length and narrower in scope are the ones that shine the brightest, balancing cleverness and poignancy. Taylor certainly has a talent for linking potent images, through which his affinity for Barthelme shows, and he often indulges a sincere touch with common people and the tragedies of their lives. In stories such as “What Was Once All Yours” and “Somewhere I Have Heard This Before” and “A House in Our Arms” and “Tennessee,” Taylor is at his absolute finest.
In “Tennessee” we see a familiar trope combined with a modern twist—it’s the return of the prodigal son, but this version features a family of transplanted South Florida Jews, forced by layoffs into moving to a suburb of Nashville. This relocation allows for an exploration of identity struggle within a familiar and traditional structure. There’s a father who cleans compulsively to establish a sense of self-worth after losing his job, a brother who smokes cigarettes to punish his parents for migrating, and a narrator, Daniel, who struggles most of all to establish an identity within his family. As Daniel says early on, “We were Hannukah-and-lox Jews, not the Kashrut-and-Shabbos kind,” and being able to tactfully wield social symbols is an important skill he apparently lacks. After a night of drinking, Daniel is asked to take the virginity of his brother’s best friend Dara before she leaves on a trip to the Middle East—a request that reveals the anxieties of their historical moment as opposed to those of previous generations. “I don’t want to die a virgin,” Dara explains, revealing her eschatological fears to Daniel. “Like if I did get blown up on a bus or something. I’d have never even known what [sex] was like.” Unlike their grandparents, this generation of Jews isn’t afraid of dying in the Holocaust or a Pogrom—they fear car bombs and terrorist attacks. By the end, the plot anxieties of “Tennessee” aren’t really resolved, but the philosophical points are at least connected by the impending sexual act, exemplifying how the fear of apocalypse is passed on.
Most of Taylor’s characters are unremarkable, the kind of people who serve as colorful footnotes to the lives of high-achievers. And while Todd, the main character of “A House in Our Arms,” isn’t all that noteworthy himself—an apathetic hedge fund worker who falls asleep reading New Yorker articles—he does manage to find himself in a love triangle with a girl he knows from college and a man he meets at a gallery opening. Leah is stunning, bisexual, and an aspiring artist who talks about getting her MFA as if she plans on “dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.” On the other hand, Richard is a cosmopolitan Manhattanite and seems to genuinely care for Todd. You get the feeling that Todd has a good thing going with Richard, but he’s too confused by his relationship with Leah to see that his life would be better without her. “I no longer think of Leah as the love of my life,” he says, “but I do still sometimes think we might make each other the happiest. It would be more like teaming up than being married.” And Todd and Leah would the kind of well-matched couple envied by their friends if it wasn’t for the one complication keeping them apart: that Leah doesn’t love him. So Todd is drawn to the older man who pursues him, craving “the undivided affection Richard gives me on our nights together.” We see here that relationships usually aren’t about finding a match or being the envy of others. It all comes down to being loved in the end. But, of course, Todd is unable to realize this, overcome by his sense of entitlement. He holds out for the edgy and sensuous woman—as opposed to the caring and intelligent man—and he’s young enough to believe that if he just hangs around long enough, she’ll eventually love him back.
In “A House in Our Arms,” Todd reads a selection of Frank O’Hara poetry that exposes what is perhaps the major theme of this collection—“the unrecapturable nostalgia for nostalgia / for a life I might have hated, thus mourned.” In Todd’s recognition of the love he’ll never have with Leah—and more importantly, of what he’s lost with Richard—the essence of Everything Here is laid bare. The growing pains these characters endure is not so painful in and of themselves, but it’s in the act of thinking about growing older—in being nostalgic for the present—through which they place themselves within the world at large.
The sixteen stories that make up Everything Here are generally short, most of them coming in under ten pages, and for this reason I wondered how they would work as a collection. The initial stories, and the final few for that matter, are too pedantic, they try too hard to be big, like “a protest sign, or long-winded bumper sticker,” to quote the collection’s final story. And more often than not they cut off before things get really complicated. Like “Tennessee,” many just stop without really ending. In terms of plot and theme, there are a bunch of loose ends, which puts a good deal of pressure on the proceeding stories to fill in the gaps left by their predecessors. There’s a recklessness in how these stories are told and in the way they jump from one to another, a speed that borders on daring. It would have been nice to see some of them linger a while longer in their moments of uncertainty before rushing off to the next scenario, but the book’s structure is fitting in other ways too. Taylor doesn’t provide us with many answers; he presents a scenario, provides an image, raises the stakes and then gets out, something Barthelme was a master at. And perhaps this is where their greatest similarity lies, in that many of these stories demand to be read multiple times, often functioning more like poetry than fiction, although they aren’t really prose-poems. It’s in these second and third readings that the broader significance of the work emerges, where we find what vital goods simmer under the surface.

Pre-pub buzz had Shani Boianjiu’s debut novel, the intriguingly if somewhat cumbersomely titled The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, as a The Things They Carried--Mean Girls hybrid. If you are finding it just a little difficult to picture a Venn diagram where a novel-in-stories about the Vietnam War intersects with a Tina-Fey-penned movie about the travails of high school girls, consider this: both war and high school are marked by a strange blend of ennui and nearly unbearable stress, of existential dread and petty banality. (But, yes, it’s also true that only one of these makes you ponder the cruel betrayals of fame and fortune vis-à-vis a once fresh-faced, plucky, promising Lindsay Lohan.)
High school may be war, but, ultimately, if one must cast The People of Forever in pop culture terms, the book is mostly reminiscent of the Lena Dunham-created HBO show Girls. With its episodic structure, its unfolding in seemingly standalone stories actually bound together by insistent echoes, and its cast of recently-graduated young women — three, in the case of Boianjiu’s novel, to Dunham’s show’s four — pretending to a maturity, a certainty, they neither possess nor successfully imitate, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid takes as its subject rites of passage, looks at transient but fraught moments in a transitional time. And, like Dunham’s fictional(ized) stand-in Hannah Horvath, Boianjiu may well be the voice of her generation or, at least, a voice of a generation.
Boianjiu’s generation is comprised of the young women who, having completed high school, are conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Army service provides the backdrop for much of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, though the book has little to do with the business of war. There are, to be sure, eruptions of violence — a male soldier is very nearly decapitated, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and Israel’s subsequent 2006 war in Lebanon are integrated into the plot, and the novel’s third section explores the peacetime aftershocks of armed conflict, for “when the boy soldiers returned from the war they tortured the girl soldiers who waited for them” — but for the most part, the book may well be set in the Brooklyn of Girls. Yael, Avishag, and Lea, the three friends who split narratorial duties and narrative focus, are mostly bored, biding their time at checkpoints, like wasting time in dead-end internships, waiting for their real lives to begin. I don’t mean to make light of the very grave, very deadly geopolitical concerns that are necessarily the background of a novel with its gaze firmly fixed on life in Israel, on life in the Israeli army. But these concerns are mostly background in The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which reads, above all, as a coming-of-age story.
We meet Yael, Avishag, and Lea when they are still in school, a “caravan of a classroom” in a tiny village on the Lebanese border. (Boianjiu herself grew up in such a town.) Like any students on the verge of graduation, the girls are tempted to ignore the lecture, to pass notes and fantasize about parties and crushes, to speculate about whose house might be without parental supervision long enough to host those parties and entertain those crushes. The lecture at hand is about the “PLO, SAM, IAF, RPG children,” Syrian submarines and Palestinian children trying to shoot RPG rockets at Israeli soldiers and burning each other instead, but, as a sub-chapter heading tells us, “History Is Almost Over.” These young women, like young women everywhere, believe that the past stops with their present, that their futures will be different and special and lovely. And this is of course terrifying.
Army notices are sent out. The girls prepare for service. Yael becomes a weapons instructor, responsible for training other soldiers in the art of marksmanship. (An editorial by Boianjiu in last Sunday’s New York Times revealed that this was her own position during her two years of IDF service. I mention this fact mostly by way of noting that Yael, who bears the heaviest load of the narration, seems closest to the author herself, serving as ego in the triangulated configuration of herself and the imperious Lea and the depressive, impulsive Avishag.) Lea checks documents at a West Bank checkpoint and desperately tries to enter into the history and experiences of the men trying to cross. Avishag serves as a guard overlooking the border. All three pretend at being grownups, at being tough, and all three remain vulnerable, become more vulnerable. They flash back to their childhoods, their conventionally troubled families, to which all three return, however briefly, after the completion of their service. The girls’ reunion becomes a momentarily idyllic return to the safety of childhood configurations, a respite not from war — which is after all a kind of existential truth in their lives — but from the need to pose as confident, as capable. Only about twenty when they leave the army, the girls are poised on the threshold of a world that does not seem to them quite real, and they postpone their entrance by retreating into old patterns, old games.
The author herself is still very young, only twenty-five. She is also the youngest recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, selected for that honor by the novelist Nicole Krauss. Boianjiu has something of Krauss's sensibility, her interest in intersecting lives, the seams where unexpected connections are exposed. In The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, Boianjiu showcases a lovely sort of simplicity, allowing the girls’ voices to ring true, to ring young and innocent and sad. In this, she strikes no false notes: Yael and Lea and Avishag are just different enough from each other to be interesting, just similar enough to be believable friends. The book falls apart near the end, asked to bear a burden it has not convincingly built to. It becomes, too suddenly, with too little warning, about war, and it loses sight of the characters who helped us make sense of all that has come before. But, for those moments when Yael and Lea and Avishag and their splendid, troubled, mundane lives are slowly developing in front of us, a strip of photo-booth pictures coming into a precision and a clarity, we fully believe in their existence and their sense of that existence.

I am having trouble with a sentence. The point I would like to make is that I wish Stanley Fish’s new book had taken a different approach. Complicating that is that I mean for it to be a first sentence, and, hence, it bears all the burdens of a first impression. As a place to start, consider:
Although I have generally loved Stanley Fish’s work, I found his new book disappointing.
Weakening this sentence is that awful “generally.” I have adopted, it seems, an academic’s defensive precision: “I certainly wouldn’t want to say I have loved all of Fish’s work, I haven’t read all of Fish’s work and I don’t want to be held responsible for it.” That “generally,” and the underlying thought it betrays, is weaselly, and, really, I can’t recall ever actually disliking one of Fish’s essays (which is not to say I never disagreed)[1]. It’s gotta go.
Although I have loved Stanley Fish’s work, I found his new book disappointing.
Of course, now it seems like my sentence is missing a word. I could replace it with something. “Always”? Too...breathless. Especially with “loved.” I’m not sure what to do.
I suppose this sentence is an example of the
Although [general condition], [exception to the general condition].
form. We use this form a lot, of course, in the (often false) hope of awakening interest in our readers. In order for this move to really work, the reader has to have some investment in the general condition, or else the general condition needs to be such a commonplace that it would be surprising that I would be disputing it. Mostly neither condition obtains, and what the construction of my sentence really represents is lazy, good-enough-to-get-started writing.
Let’s ditch the offending clause.
I found Stanley Fish’s new book disappointing.
At least this has the advantage of directness. But now, the sentence is about me, which I guess would be OK, especially if I was an important reviewer of books on writing, or if I was participating in some forum where Fish’s book was well known. As it is, though, this sentence has misplaced emphasis, about what I found rather than Fish’s book. I could invert it --
Stanley Fish’s new book disappointed me.
-- but even inverted, it’s about my disappointment, and, worse, it now has an unfortunate schoolmarmy tone to it: “Stanley, you have not lived up to my expectations.”
Well, let’s just take me out of it.
Stanley Fish’s new book is disappointing.
In many ways, this is better. It is declarative. It takes an unsoftened stand. That the statement is my opinion isn’t really lost, since as the author of the sentence it is obviously my opinion. It might even awaken a reader’s interest: “disappointing how?” I could live with this sentence. However, I have altogether lost my original intention which was less about the disappointingness of Fish’s book and more about expressing my wish that he had taken a different approach.
You see, a while ago Fish wrote several editorials about writing in his New York Times column. In those, he argued, just like he does in his new book, that the form of a sentence is the proper focus for composition instruction. Much like what classical rhetoricians believed about eloquence, Fish argues you can teach students to write by teaching them to pour their ideas into the molds of well-formed sentences. Unfortunately, the notions of figure and trope in rhetoric kind of degenerated, like expositions of grammar often degenerate, into butterfly-pinning, and I don’t know of anyone who much teaches polysyndeton or aporia[2] in their public speaking course nowadays. What I had hoped for, I guess, was not an extension of his argument, or a further call to pay attention to form in writing instruction. I hoped Fish would actually begin to catalogue the forms themselves, to begin to set all of the available rhetorical variations into some sort of order.
I mean, take the form I offered before:
Although [general condition], [exception to the general condition].
There is a lot you can do with this. Students can be asked to produce a bunch of examples of the case, and thereby learn to use it fluently. You can notice that the “although” can be moved to the second clause with just a slight change in emphasis, and, I think, an improved sentence resulting. (“I have generally loved Stanley Fish’s work, although I found his new book disappointing.”) You could develop a notation system -- like sentence diagramming! -- that captured the relation of the clauses and the optional placement of the “although.” You could notice that the second placement of “although” can be replaced by “however” or “but,” but not the first, and try to explain why. You could observe that this species of sentence is a member of a larger genus, something like
[statement], [contrasting statement].
whose various members entail differing specific relations between the clauses, and who require differing coordinating words between. (For example, see Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’sThey Say/I Say.) You could provide rhetorical analyses of each form you identify, much like I did earlier when I concluded that my original sentence was merely lazy, since it offered an irritant that wasn’t particularly irritating as a way to pretend to coax interest. This all seems to me, as it does to Fish, to be good work for students to do.
So my disappointment with Fish’s book is that it doesn’t offer a program to catalogue all of the various forms of sentences and variations and genuses and species,[3] with rhetorical analyses for each. To try again to communicate this, it might be best to go back to my original statement of my intent:
I wish Stanley Fish’s new book had taken a different approach.
What I have lost here from the earlier attempts, besides my explicit disappointment, is the warmth toward Fish’s work that I have felt in the past. That, and there’s nothing here to really engage a reader uninvested in Fish’s approach. What I really want to express is the mixed feelings I have around my disappointment in Fish’s new book. Let’s go for that:
I admit, I found Stanley Fish’s new book disappointing.
I admit, I like this new sentence.[4] It doesn’t outright say anything about my affection for Fish’s work, but it implies it pretty well without breathlessness. What I think is nice about it is that it suddenly has a voice (the previous sentences seem to me to be generically academic), and it seemingly -- aporetically -- places the blame for my disappointment on me rather than on Fish’s book. It expresses shame over having to admit that I found his book disappointing, and shame, I think, can sell a sentence.
So, although it isn’t really fair to criticize an author for not writing the book you wanted them to write, I admit, I found Stanley Fish’s new book disappointing. I can think of all sorts of reasons Fish wouldn’t actually want to take on the project I outlined for him, I mean, just to start with, it is pretty much endless, and if one were to take it seriously, one would inevitably end up, just like the classical rhetoricians, butterfly-pinning all of the various forms one found, an activity which entirely loses the point, I think, of the instruction Fish intends. You can catalogue and dissect, like God’s own grammar teacher, or like the authors all of those sentence diagrams I was forced to study in fifth grade, and learn literally nothing about how to write effectively, a point which Fish’s book, and, indeed, most every recent book that tries to help us write better, makes.
Back when I was trying to learn to play jazz guitar, I came across a book, Patterns for Jazz, that seemed to me to hold the promise of finally figuring out how to play across chord progressions. Apart from a minuscule amount of discussion (most of which concerns “how to use this book”), the book consists of little musical phrases, mostly four and eight notes long, that are to be transposed and played across an array of chord sequences. You could -- I did -- play these patterns over and over in hopes of learning enough phrases for each chord that you could sound halfway competent when confronted with “All of Me.” This book, in short, is the jazz equivalent of the writing text I wanted Fish to write: “Here are the forms. Put them to use.”
I never learned to play jazz guitar. I don’t know if that should be attributed to a failure of pedagogy, or merely a failure of musician. But, in retrospect, I can see that I wasn’t really using the text in the way that the authors of Patterns for Jazz meant. The point they intended (I think) was that students should play the patterns so much that they would be able to spontaneously predict how any given note or pattern would sound in the musical context they found themselves in. That is, you practice the rote forms so that you know your instrument and the chords so well that you don’t need rote forms to create.
Fish doesn’t seem to make his students spend too much time filling in sentence templates. Instead, he suggests that they elaborate simple forms into complex ones, discover variations and manipulations of forms (much like my observation, above, that the “although” could occupy two locations interchangeably), and, in general, observe how relationships between things and activities are manifested in sentences, and learn how to create those relationships. Like the successful jazz musician, students learn to attend to form and context (“prehearing” is the word Patterns for Jazz uses) in order to express themselves competently. Although he doesn’t say so, I believe Fish already knows that the butterfly project is hopeless. In fact, at least in a sense, you could summarize his whole program (including his literary criticism) as a disciplined approach to paying attention to sentences. If you can do that, he says, and not allow yourself to get bogged down arguing or applauding what the sentence is saying, or likewise mired in grammar and correctness, you can learn to write.
Back | 1. This parenthetical is also weaselly, and for exactly the same reason.
Back | 2. This essay being an example of aporia.
Back | 3. That was polysyndeton.
Back | 4. [confession], [revelation].